Saturday, September 1, 2012

A word to the army of Davids

It was always our intention at PolitiFact Bias to encourage and highlight the work of an army of Davids in confronting PolitiFact's distortions of the truth.

We're happy to say that the army of Davids is growing and producing an abundance of accurate and effective criticism.

The volume of material from that army, unfortunately, presents a great challenge in terms of providing recognition. We keep a bulletin board of sorts with a list of stories for review. That list reached its all-time greatest length this week.

We'd love to issue a review of every one of the items on the list, but that's increasingly impractical. Our "Contra PolitiFact" section in the sidebar features some consistently good sources of material, so please continue using those links to find good material we haven't yet highlighted.

Back in 2008 when I first discovered PolitiFact, it was very difficult for me to believe I was the only one that saw through the subtle twists in reasoning and the inconsistency in PolitiFact's application of standards that overwhelmingly benefited the left. It wasn't long before Bryan and I noticed each other making similar observations and comments on PolitiFact's Facebook page. Back then, we certainly felt very alone in a forest of praise for PolitiFact, and we eagerly shared whatever obscure and rare articles we could find that echoed or supplemented our concerns.

Gradually criticism mounted, and in January of 2011 we created this site with the goal of collecting and promoting the best critiques we could find. Our intention was to establish a collection point for people to research and discover the flaws and bias in PolitiFact's system.

Almost two years later, that rumble of criticism has grown to a loud roar. An article highlighting a PolitiFact flub was once a rare find, and now the rebukes are so numerous we simply can't keep up.

We'd like to think we contributed to that, but we couldn't have done it without the many readers who email, Tweet, or share our site. A hearty thank you to the many of you who do. Your help in spreading the word has helped pull the perception of PolitiFact's credibility closer to where it belongs.